The queen of manners, who educated America on everything from how to eat gracefully to the art of letter writing, passed away on Monday at the Sunrise at Fox Hill nursing facility in Bethesda, Maryland.
According to her longtime friend Mary M Mitchell, she had severe osteoarthritis and cardiac complications.
Before joining the Kennedy White House to help her friend and fellow Vassar alumna, the former Jacqueline Bouvier, Ms Baldrige served as the public relations director at Tiffany & Co.
She was reportedly the company’s first female executive.
As part of the Kennedy administration she was responsible for organizing and issuing invitations to glittering social occasions and state dinners.
She left her post in June 1963, less than six months before President John F Kennedy’s assassination.
Explaining the reason behind her resignation, she said that she ‘ had had it,’ with the long hours and demands of the job.
However, in a 1964 interview for the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, she remembered the Kennedys as perfectionists and the president as an exemplary manager.
Ms Baldrige, known as Tish, recalled: ‘He was like a wonderful department store manager who goes through the store and knows everybody’s name and knows how all the departments work and knows how to wrap packages better than the wrappers in the wrapping department.’
Letitia Baldrige, standing left, looks on as a
smiling Jackie Onassis throws the dice as she plays 'Counterstrike' with
the game's inventor, Roger Tuckerman in 1975
Lea Gallic, known as 'Miss Candy', presents a
matched pair of antique candy jars to Letitia Baldrige, then secretary
to Jackie Kennedy, who accepted the gift on behalf of the First Lady
Tea in honor of Letitia Baldridge hosted by Laura Bush
And since the late 1970s, she became known for her memoirs and books on etiquette, notably her updated version of The Amy Vanderbilt Complete Book of Etiquette in 1978.
When her face appeared on the cover of Time magazine the same year, she was hailed as the nation’s ‘social arbiter’ of ‘new American manners’.
Ms Baldrige was born on February 9, 1926, to the future Republican congressman Howard Baldrige and his wife Regina and spent her childhood in Omaha.
It was at Miss Porter’s private school in Farmington, Connecticut, that she first met Jacqueline Bouvier.
From the start she was an admirer of the future First Lady.
She wrote later: ‘Her classic good looks were complemented by her sense of style. Nothing ever looked wrong on her.’
Ms Baldrige is survived by her husband, Robert Hollensteiner, their two children, Clare and Malcom, and seven grandchildren.
Letitia Baldrige, right, who has died aged 86, was social secretary to Jackie Kennedy, left, while she was First Lady
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